‘Sometimes the gun is taller than the kid’: How ISIS uses schools to indoctrinate children

An ISIS propaganda photo
shows children playing outside of a school in Anbar province,
Iraq.Nashir

At first glance, the children in ISIS propaganda videos look just
like those you'd find in any elementary school across the world.
They're smiling and happy, toting bright backpacks, and running
around playing kickball outside.

But it's hard to miss the sign that these aren't normal students
— the black cloth tied around some of their heads that bears the
Islamic State's symbol.

The terrorist group (which is also known as ISIS, ISIL, and
Daesh) has released a barrage of propaganda in recent months
touting the schools in the territory ISIS refers to as its
"caliphate," located in parts of Iraq and Syria.

Business Insider viewed
several propaganda videos featuring children and saw dozens of
photos of kids posted on ISIS' social media channels.

Photos show students sitting attentively in class, always
segregated by gender, and solving math problems on a chalkboard.
They display textbooks with math problems that mix weapons and
tanks in with objects like fruit and flowers.

ISIS is "trying to establish its deep roots for itself ... by
creating many classrooms worth of heavily indoctrinated, heavily
committed children who are being brought up only understanding
the world through Islamic State’s binary view of jihad, which is
dangerous," Charlie Winter, an expert on ISIS propaganda
and senior researcher for Georgia State University, told Business
Insider.

ISIS targets children specifically, aiming to create a generation
of loyal followers who are indoctrinated from an early age and
therefore might be less likely to dissent. It's an issue that
worries experts like Winter.

"It is instilling very young children with … Islamism, jihadism,
and it’s something that’s going to stick around for a long, long
time," Winter said. "It’s an elephant in the room that isn’t
being given enough scrutiny."

In Raqqa, ISIS' de-facto capital in Syria, ISIS throws parties
for children and hands out toys and prizes for answering
questions correctly, Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, a Syrian activist
with the group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, told Business
Insider late last year.

"Boys it's affecting a lot," said Raqqawi, who goes by a
pseudonym. "They see all the time guns and calls for jihad. So
they love to go. Sometimes they think it's a game, so they love
to go and do these things."

ISIS targets children because it's easier to recruit them than
adult men, Raqqawi said. Experts have said that such regular
exposure to violence normalizes it in children's minds.

"It's very familiar to see a lot of children carrying a AK-47s,"
Raqqawi said. "Sometimes the gun is taller than the kid."

Indoctrination

ISIS has made violence commonplace in the "caliphate," the swath
of territory it controls in Iraq and Syria, meaning that a new
generation of children living in those areas are in danger of
being socialized to believe that such brutality is normal.

"If violence is being broadcast in the open, children would see
it and believe that it's normal and accepted because it's in
public and it's not publicly condemned, which would lead children
to commit similar violent acts," Rachel
Bryson, a researcher who studies ISIS propaganda at the
Quilliam Foundation, told Business Insider late last year.

She added: "They're aiming to control a lot of the curriculum to
indoctrinate children, and so that is just a way to do it. Nazi
Germany was a similar situation."

ISIS has been known to leave headless bodies in the streets, lock
people in cages in public squares for infractions as petty as
smoking, and carry out public executions. The group
has also set up "media points" around its territory to
broadcast its propaganda videos in open-air theaters.

As children are immersed in this public violence, they are also
targeted by ISIS members who lure them with various techniques.

"Sometimes they make parties for children, so if you answer the
right question they will give you a present or a mobile phone.
... They recruit a lot of young boys" this way, Raqqawi said.

A Syrian man from Deir Ezzor, who goes by the name Fikram, told
Business Insider last month that the ISIS "advocacy" office
"distributes biscuits and juice to passerby children while they
showcase publications."

ISIS sends some of its child recruits to military camps to train
them in how to handle weapons and fight. Militants provide an
incentive to poor families by offering to pay parents hundreds of
dollars per month for each child they send, according to
Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently. ISIS calls these children,
who have been featured in many ISIS propaganda
releases, "Cubs of
the Caliphate."

An ISIS propaganda videos
features child fighters.Nashir

Curriculum

Even the children who resist recruitment to ISIS' military
training camps are now apparently being indoctrinated in schools
in some ISIS-controlled cities.

"The military camps are for military training in particular, so
they don’t necessarily educate in things like geography and
history and the humanities," Winter said. "... To be a Caliphate
Cub is different from being a kid living in the caliphate."

ISIS shut down many schools in its caliphate, but some have been
reopened after militants indoctrinated teachers with their
radical ideology and developed a curriculum that supports its
mission.

"They are making these books for propaganda, sending the message
to foreign fighters that we have books, we have schools, that
your kids will have education," Raqqawi told Business Insider in
January.

Like most aspects of life in the caliphate, its schools are
supposedly run by a bureaucratic agency set up by the militants
to mimic the operations of a legitimate state.

A report from MosulEye, an Iraqi historian who reports on
daily life in ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq under a pseudonym,
details how ISIS attempted to build up an infrastructure for
education after the terrorists took over the city:

[The education emir] sees that the age a child must start his
education at is the age of 4 years. At this age, the child learns
how to read and write, and by the age of 5 years, the child
starts to learn the alphabets of monotheism, then teach the child
the Arabic language more heavily to be able to understand the
Quran correctly and accurately. Then, at the age of 10, the child
starts his Shar'i[a] education until the age of 15 years
old. At the age of 15, the young student then starts to learn how
to use weaponry and electronic technology and then it is
determined which field the young student must be directed to
complete his studies after presenting the student before an
evaluation committee to evaluate the student's capabilities and
qualifications and the field under ISIL's rule Soft Resistance
and Civil Disobedience the student will excel at.

ISIS has also reportedly included weapons training in its
elementary-school curriculum. There are dress codes as well —
girls as young as 6 years old are reportedly forced to wear
niqab face coverings.

Rasha Al Aqeedi, a researcher from Mosul, said the report matches
what she's been hearing from her sources in Iraq, although she
couldn't confirm that all schools include military training.

"Until last February schools were pretty much the same apart from
eliminating some topics considered non-Islamic," Aqeedi told
Business Insider via email.

In recent months, ISIS has released propaganda photos showing
these textbooks being printed, and the books can also be found
online.

Business Insider viewed one textbook that was circulated by
ISIS-affiliated channels on the secure-messaging app Telegram
late last year.

At first glance, the document looks similar to any math workbook
you'd find in a typical grade school. But the equations are
filled with illustrations of guns, tanks, and bombs alongside
normal, everyday items.

Winter has seen similar books.

"There was one [math problem] that said, 'If the caliphate has
283,000 lions and the crusaders have 277,000 soldiers, how many
heroes make the difference?'" Winter said. "Ludicrous things like
that."

ISIS

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MosulEye's report also mentions the textbooks. ISIS reportedly
forced teachers in Mosul to show up to a center to rewrite school
curriculum to suit the group's needs.

"ISIL imposed harsh conditions with regards to attendance; every
professor writes down his name on the attendance sheet daily, and
for those who violate their attendance, a punishment awaits
them," the report notes.

"ISIL has invested heavily on reconstructing the educational
curricula, and spent a long time to reconstruct them all over.
They revised the curricula three times because [the head of ISIS'
education council] did not approve them."

Raqqawi confirmed the existence of the textbooks in an interview
with Business Insider in January.

ISIS seems to be teaching chemistry, physics, mathematics, and
English, all tailored to the group's message and purposes.

"For the chemistry, they teach kids how to make bombs," Raqqawi
told Business Insider in January. "Same thing with the physics.
For geography, they are telling the kids that there is only the
territories of Islam and the territories of Kufar [infidels]."

The territories of Islam are depicted as light, while the
territories of the infidels are dark, Raqqawi said.

Liz Sly, a reporter for The Washington Post in the Middle East,
toured the town of Tal Abyad in Syria late last year after it was
liberated from ISIS. She documented the classrooms she came
across in photos on her Instagram account.

They show bomb-making tutorials and illustrations instructing
students how to bring down helicopters:

Western journalists aren't able operate in ISIS territory, so
it's difficult to know how these textbooks are actually being
used in the caliphate. But experts believe the militants are
actually educating young kids with this material.

"Based on the evidence that we have, and also the documents that
have emerged and been translated, as well as conversations I’ve
had with people in Iraq, yes, I think that they are administering
schools," Winter said.

Children also study ISIS ideology in mosques.

"Most of the children go to the mosques for Sharia courses,"
Raqqawi said. "... Some people don't like ISIS at all but when
they force them to go to these Sharia courses they change a lot.
… It's really shocking how they're playing with people's minds."

ISIS governs its caliphate according to a strict interpretation
of Sharia law. ISIS' version of Sharia allows for amputations for
crimes like stealing.

"ISIS is recruiting children and teaching them the extreme
curriculum, which is based on fighting and religion," Ali Leili,
who runs the Syrian activist group DeirEzzor24, told Business Insider last month.

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Leili said the militants are raising kids "to hate the rest of
the communities living in Syria" and noted that an entire
generation of children in ISIS-held territory is at risk of
growing up without proper education. They would know only ISIS'
radical curriculum.

Raqqawi echoed this belief.

"It’s like these kids are a time bomb," he said. "It’s not just a
problem for Syria, it’s a problem for the whole region. We don’t
know where these kids will go, what they will do."

Communities in Iraq and Syria are already seeing the effects of
this indoctrination — Raqqawi said that children as young as 12
years old are being used for suicide attacks.

"They want to make [it seem] like everything in their life is
about weapons and explosions and war and fighting for Islam,"
Raqqawi said. "Their main idea is to recruit these children and
make them into what they want. Small children, you can control
them, you can shape them how you want."

The instructor tells the children: "We must implement God's
religion over all people. God says do jihad until intrigue,
idolatry, and infidelity are gone from the world."

In this school, ISIS also conducts hands-on lessons with weapons:

Screenshot/PBS

The ISIS instructor asks a child what Kalashnikovs (a type of
automatic rifle) are used for, and the child replies, "to defend
the faith." When the instructor asks who they'll hit with the
weapon, the child replies, "infidels."

The children are also given weapons to practice with. They appear
to be unloaded.

Screenshot/PBS

Screenshot/PBS

The instructor justifies teaching children such gruesome skills.

"Sharia law tells us that children should be given all essential
skills," he tells PBS. "So we teach them and give them military
training to prepare them in mind and body so they are set on the
right path and each generation will learn and teach in turn."

These ISIS-run schools seem to exist in addition to the military
camps for the "Cubs of the Caliphate."

Dissent

Education seems to vary widely in ISIS territory. Some parents
refuse to send their kids to ISIS schools, and many schools
remain shut down, despite ISIS claims that they are educating
children across the caliphate, activists said.

Aqeedi, the researcher from Mosul, said her friends and family
who remain there "have stopped sending their kids to education
institutions and have opted for homeschooling."

MosulEye's report confirms that many inside the city refuse to
send their children to ISIS-led schools, even though on
October 27 ISIS declared that anyone who doesn't send their
children to school will be punished and their assets confiscated.

ISIS has issued similar decrees in Syria. Fikram, the man from
Deir Ezzor, pointed to a
September report from Good Morning
Syria stating that some teachers started holding
classes in secret after ISIS moved in so that students could
continue their education free from ISIS propaganda.

A private teacher who owns a fuel station told the news outlet:
"I have a family to feed every day and knowledge to pass down to
the next generations. I sell fuel to feed my family and give
private lessons in secret to share my knowledge with the next
generations. But — like any other teacher working in secret — I
fear that, if the Islamic State found out about us, our families
would have no one to feed them, and the students no one to teach
them."